AAUG Reviews

by Guy A. Mofley, AAUG Member

I remember my first Star Trek convention. 1978. George Takei took time to let you get your photo with him and ask one question about the series Star Trek. Mine was simple: How did you do the transporter scenes? My young mind was fascinated by not only the idea of transporting, but the illusion the show used to make it seem real. With a little help from Particle Illusion, you can reproduce that effect and whole lot more.

What are particles? Particles, as it turns out, are simple shapes that you can load into Particle Illusion SE (PI) that when grouped can produce some pretty amazing illusions. Smoke, water, fire, transporter beams, explosions, lasers, moving backgrounds - these are all possible illusions in PI. I won’t go into the actual creation of the particle in this review, but PI makes it very easy to load, store and give those “building blocks” attributes for some pretty powerful manipulation.

The good news is there are hundreds, board line thousands, of pre-built particles (called emitters) that you can download from Wondertouch.com in semi-organized libraries. Once downloaded, just open them up in the library area of PI and use them without having to do any detailed particle work. The workflow for this product is simple. You start with a photo, series of photo’s or video that you want to enhance, load your emitter and using a well laid out interface manipulate/animate your emitter.

You have control over virtually every aspect of the emitter. Using a frame-by-frame approach, you control the vertical, the horizontal (sorry this was the old intro line from the Outer Limits). You do control the emitter life, size, velocity, range, etc… Translation: if you desire, you can control almost every attribute of the emitter in key frame fashion (one frame at time where PI ‘tweens’ the in-between frames).

As an example I loaded a photo my daughter in PI and thought it would be funny to have smoke come out of her ears. This is very easy. I found the smoke emitter I was looking for and after tweaking a few parameters I was able to make it look like smoke was coming our of her ears and then floating up past her head. You can also add a “deflector” which is like an invisible wall that the particles will interact with. Very helpful when your footage has a real wall that you want your illusion to acknowledge.

I have used the pro PC version of PI in the past so I was curious to compare the 2 and note the difference running this on an Intel Macbook Pro would make; especially since this version is not yet universal. There are many differences between the pro and SE version, but I found little that would impact the average hobby/enthusiast user. My major complaint as an average user is that the library (what you call a collection of emitters) interface is very elementary in the SE version; this may be fixed in the new universal version, but it’s not as friendly as the pro version.

I thought the speed would be an issue but was pleasantly surprised. The emitters displayed very well and the rendering of the movie (my emitter/emitters blended into the original footage) was very fast. PI SE will not transfer your audio, so you will need to take your rendered movie and plug it back into some editing program (iMovie, Final Cut) to keep your audio. PI is also not a 3d program. It gives the illusion of working in 3d, but is a 2d program.

Wondertouch also has a great user forum. They have harnessed the power of the Creative Cow. www.creativecow.net. This one stop shop online forum has tips for many video, photo and audio programs and uses a consistent, well laid out conversation thread approach for posting and replying to questions. Kudos to Wondertouch for getting on board with this community.

If your ready to add some first class zing to your home movies or photo’s, this is the application you’ve been looking for; fast, friendly and affordable. Pick up a copy today and transport your self into another world.